Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Two creators are not always better than one

mitsloan.mit.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 101 posts

Re: Two creators are not always better than one

#51

Post by mojuba »

mkong1 wrote: post #17
kyleashipley wrote: post #3

From the article: >The research is based on a survey of creators for thousands of Kickstarter projects between 2009 and May 2015. From the paper: >This suggests that the taken-for-granted assumption among scholars that entrepreneurship is best performed by teams should be reevaluated, with implications for theories of team performance and entrepreneurial strategy. The claims in the paper are pretty limited and based…

How many high-growth companies came out of Kickstarter? The ones that jump to mind are Oculus and Pebble, but I can't think of others.

Interestingly enough, both Oculus and Pebble were started by sole founders. Others even though officially titled "co-founders" joined later if I'm not mistaken.

Re: Two creators are not always better than one

#52

Post by PaulHoule »

darkerside wrote: post #46
PaulHoule wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is affirmative action for non-technical cofounders if you ask me. The non-technical cofounders who become VCs want to support people who remind them of themselves in the past. This is why founder dating is like dating at a tech school. There are many non-technical cofounders who bring nothing to the table except the desire to make a huge amount of money. That is something to work with, but it is by no mean…

Paul Graham had a great article on Lisp. In his view, Lisp programmers love Lisp because it offers extremely powerful features in a way that other programming languages don't. Those who don't understand Lisp are (rightly) skeptical. Their thought process goes something like, "I don't need these features, and I do my work just fine". In other words, they don't know what they're missing out on, and so it appears useles…

When I see someone who is a virtuoso of that I have a lot of respect.

Re: Two creators are not always better than one

#54

Post by mojuba »

robterrin wrote: post #41

I'm a teaching assistant for a class called Entrepreneurial Finance at my alma mater, which always has a good draw of entrepreneur and investor guest speakers. One of the recent speakers was Kent Collier, CEO of Reorg ( https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/reorg-research#secti... ), an information service to the buy-side that focuses on arcane and opaque information, particularly bankruptcy. They are a smash hit t…

> takes such a clear and unambiguous vision, with total dedication to that vision

This is very true. For most startups building a product is not just an ongoing engineering/business development task as much as it is an ongoing product development task. Your vision of the product (if you have one) is something that is most difficult to share with others. I think a great entrepreneur is closer to being an artist than to anything else: imagine two painters trying to create one painting at the same time. At times it can get as absurd.

That is not to say you don't need co-founders but maybe, just maybe, sometimes one of the founders needs a slightly dominating position in defining (and refining) the product in the process.

Re: Two creators are not always better than one

#55

Post by fourseventy »

GnarfGnarf wrote: post #22

If you're lacking a skill, hire an employee, don't invite a second founder. He who manages the accounting controls the company. If you must have a co-founder, makes sure he works as long/hard as you do.

You need capital to do that... Co-founders are free.

Re: Two creators are not always better than one

#56

Post by dgudkov »

trjordan wrote: post #12

Two founders are better than one when one of the key problems you will face is hiring. One founder hasn't proven they can recruit. Two founders have proved they can convince at least one other idiot to join them. This is important for VC businesses, where hiring quickly is the only way to grow. But it's not important for smaller businesses, where cash management matters more.

>Two founders have proved they can convince at least one other idiot to join them.

It stops being relevant once you find your 1st customer.

Re: Two creators are not always better than one

#59

Post by jppope »

petilon wrote: post #11
jppope wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YC pushes against solo founders. Dropbox was a notable one (even though Drew Houston added a "co-founder" right about when they were accepted...)

Investors in general prefer multiple founders, and they want the founders to have roughly equal equity too. In part this is because they want the ability to push a founder out if he/she isn't working out.

From what I've seen it also smooths out interactions between founders and staff... people will prefer to talk to one founder over another for certain things.

Re: Two creators are not always better than one

#60

Post by judofyr »

mgamache wrote: post #25

The title of the article should be: "2 founders are not always better than 1 for Kickstarter " Also, they didn't define success. I bet it was just getting the project funded. The bar for VC success and Kickstarter are very different. Kickstarter doesn't have growth and ROI requirements. This might be a proxy for a lifestyle business, but not VC funded companies.

> Also, they didn't define success.

It's mentioned in the paper. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3107898

> First, we examine continuation of business operations at the time of the survey (The options were: “Still in operation as an ongoing for-profit business,” “Still in operation as an ongoing not-forprofit, artistic, or other type of endeavor,” “Still in operation, but acquired by/merged with another organization,” “Not operating as a result of being acquired by/merged with another organization,” “Not operating, temporarily stopped operations,” “Not operating, permanently stopped operations,” and “Not operating for another reason.”)

> We also used reported non-crowdfunding revenue based on a 12-point categorical scale ranging from none to over $10 million, using this as a direct measure of company success.

> The first model is an unconditional model, and reveals that solo founders do no worse with respect to average income than teams of three or more.

Post reply on HN